I think the author is correct that people are missing the forest here. I know plenty of people that would have no problem with public tracing of patients (mysel

I think the author is correct that people are missing the forest here. I know plenty of people that would have no problem with public tracing of patients (myself included), but it wouldn't be effective in stopping the virus here. And not because the app's uptake would be small - people are dying to do something , anything, so they 'd download it. Maybe singaporeans did not download it because they feel already protected enough by their health system, but westerners feel so unprotected by them that they buy TP by the metric ton. S.Korea and singapore/hong kong, those are densely populated areas/cities with specific movement patterns among people and enough tehcnology infrastructure to know what do something useful with the tracing information. In some western cities, tracing would end up giving people constant alarms that they might be infected, and that information wouldn't really be actionable or at least you coulnd't trust that people would act on it. Western cities have no memory of other plagues either. Perhaps goverments should reward distancing and testing instead of punishing offenders. Perhaps even pubs could open, provided they serve the same group of 10 people every monday. Western cities will need to figure out their own policies until a cure is found, and they have to reflect their own character - you can't just copy asian policies praying that they work.